One of Seattle’s most celebrated and prolific restaurateurs plans to make a big splash in Pioneer Square: Renee Erickson’s Sea Creatures group, which you may know from such restaurants as the Whale Wins and Bateau, plans to launch not one, not two, but three new restaurants at 419 Occidental Avenue, part of the Railspur development.

Erickson, a James Beard Award–winning chef, has owned restaurants since 1998, when she bought the now-shuttered Boat Street Cafe, but she’s really been on a tear since she opened her Ballard oyster bar the Walrus and the Carpenter in 2008 — her Sea Creatures group now has 10 restaurants, including the doughnut mini-chain General Porpoise. (Sea Creatures also operates Westward, which it acquired in 2018.) Along the way Sea Creatures has established itself as one of Seattle’s most recognizable dining brands — an Erickson restaurant combines a focus on seafood, millennial-friendly soft minimalist design, seasonal menus, and an overall sense that you’re hanging out in the lobby of your coolest friend’s apartment building. 

Sea Creatures restaurants adorn several of Seattle’s cutting-edge real estate developments. Roman-inspired Willmott’s Ghost and the cocktail bar Deep Dive are inside the Amazon Spheres (as is a General Porpoise location you need an Amazon lanyard to access). Erickson’s latest restaurant, the wine bar Lioness, is inside the Shared Roof mixed-use building on Phinney Ridge, a project of developer Chad Dale — who is also a co-owner of Sea Creatures.

Railspur fits the bill of that new-wave Seattle development — it’s a “transformative micro district” of three buildings and a series of alleys that already houses upscale taqueria Tacolisto and the Hotel Westland, which is set to open next year. Railspur is a major component of the post-lockdown revitalization of Pioneer Square that has unfolded as events return to the stadiums and cruise ships return to the nearby waterfront.